“... recording of the fabric of daily life, they resemble Pilgrimage, in which, as the novelist May Sinclair noted approvingly, ‘nothing happens.’ Richardson was the third of four daughters of a man who sold the family grocery business in order to live as a ‘gentleman’. But the privileges she enjoyed – summer holidays by the sea, a good education ...”

“... altered and deepened. I myself have never found him a particularly attractive figure, though this may be a function of my gender. Contrary to what is often supposed, Boswell was never very interested in, as distinct from obsessed with, women. His journals and letters rarely recorded female conversations for their own sake. With the exception of Belle de ...”

“... off each other more harmoniously; but they are still very visible, a sort of signature, and it may be worth trying to say what they are. Garrulousness first of all. Rushdie’s narrators not only talk a lot, they are their talk. They are not so much characters as voices – sometimes they are unconvincing as characters – and the less they understand ...”

“... observations. In other words, the disorienting physical and social environment of eastern Montana may be exactly as he reports it, just as the mouth of the Mississippi really is (or was) a torrent of mud and uprooted trees, and the Atlantic voyage against the prevailing winds in a mid-19th-century steamer much less comfortable than sailing home with the wind ...”

“... it detracted not at all from his enjoyment of women. Brivati thinks that he and Dora Gaitskell may have had an arrangement which allowed for his probably quite numerous affairs, particularly his long relationship with Ian Fleming’s wife, Ann – certainly the Gaitskells often dined with one or both Flemings, making one wonder quite what the mutual ...”

“... his literary judgments, submit to being guided and corrected by the lesser man? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that their friendship was conceived within the sentimental conventions of an earlier day, a heady mix of Byron and Rousseau. Such friendships typically had their roots in the alienated idealism of early adolescence and included a high-minded ...”

“... to bits, refusing to let him learn it. The unique androgyny of the piano – or pianoforte – may account for this disparity. While we want it to be feminine (a lyrical stringed instrument), it’s also massively, and maddeningly, masculine (a percussive instrument), something Prokofiev but not Rachmaninov understood. And something Helfgott understands a ...”

“... lists of the authors and articles published and reviewed under Burke’s aegis. These compendia may strain one’s attention, but it is certainly worth pausing to consider one or two of them and reflect on the nature of a creative moment – and a publishing enterprise – which, within the space of a few years, commissioned Ezra Pound’s letters from ...”

“... neophytes seeking transformation. Olgivanna kept Wright on a short leash even when sexual fantasy may be assumed to have taken the place of sexual activity.’ Taliesin, even now, preserves not just the archive and the place but also the festivals of the Fellowship. This preserved presence apart, what was Wright’s legacy? The split-level ranch house, Gill ...”

“... Sky of blue water, blue-water sky, I sleep with the dubious kiss Of my sky-blue portfolio ... It may be that, after the initial breakthrough, the model of the intense sensual lyric McGuckian has fashioned for herself has difficulties in evolving in interesting new directions – though her imagination is so vivid and confident it is hard to see this state of ...”

“... the perverse relationship between violence and luxury in a sequence of analogues, though behind it may lurk a more old-fashioned poem of sexual disgust. Rolls-Royces idle, ‘their seats upholstered with the hides of stillborn calves’; there’s a ‘jigger of blood on your swish organza’; even a tagged cactus causes ‘ecstasy’ by reminding ‘you’ of ...”

“... the sense of a pro-Hitler cabal, was the invention of the Marxist journalist Claud Cockburn. Nancy may have invited Ribbentrop to lunch, and she didn’t like Jews: but she didn’t want Hitler to be beastly to them either. As for her set, Fox points out, it included fervent anti-Hitlerites such as Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Bob Brand, who regretted that ...”

“... of the bourgeois parties whose splinters ultimately rallied to Nazism. This is nonsense. In May 1924 the Nazis won 6.6 per cent of the vote, but this had fallen to 3 per cent by December and to 2.6 per cent in 1928. Weimar weathered inflation. What cast it down was the 1929 Crash and Depression. By 1930 the Nazis were up to 18.3 per cent and by July ...”

“... behind just speed, Valium, alcohol and depression, that it might cause those of us who suspect we may be without a life to wonder if we want one after all. Celia Birtwell divorced him for incontinence with both sex (both sexes) and drugs, and when he beat her up she took out an injunction against him. He mourned the loss of access to his sons and the effects ...”

“... a young American heiress, who is waiting for the sick and debauched countess to die so that she may assume the title. As Lucio points out, the Earl also has a ravishingly beautiful daughter, Lady Sybil, who like all daughters of the aristocracy is up for sale. The tiresome Tempest, however, still hankers to have his rejected novel published, so the Prince ...”